Using Model Transformation Techniques for the Superimposition of Architectural Styles

Abstract

Abstract. Software Architecture is a key artifact in the software development process, as it provides a bridge between the requirements of the system-to-be and its final design. Architectural description is therefore a critical step, which can be assisted by the use of Architectural Styles. Styles make it possible to reuse architectural knowledge by providing guidelines for its description, and by constraining the configuration and behavior of the target system. The architect must superimpose these constraints, but this could be an error-prone task unless some kind of automatic support is provided. Therefore, this paper presents a proposal that generates proto-architectures by superimposing architectural styles on the initial requirements' operationalization, using model-to-model (M2M) transformation techniques. Our proposal includes a tool called MORPHEUS, which applies QVT as the transformation language; a real-world example is provided to explain how the superimposition process works, and how the QVT language is used to express these style-based transformations.

Antipatterns for Architectural Knowledge Management

“…It must be pointed out that ATRIUM is independent of the architectural metamodel used to describe the proto-architecture, because the architect only has to describe the needed transformations to instantiate the architectural metamodel he deems appropriate. Currently, the set of transformations [56] to generate the proto-architecture instantiating the PRISMA architectural model [70] has been defined. This activity resembles other works, [18] [65], that also generate the software architecture using M2M techniques.…”

“…The DesignAssets are generated along with the proto-architecture, so that each architectural element is related to the set of DDs that motivated its specification and the DRs that justify those decisions. In addition, the necessary traceability relationships are also generated from artifacts and relationships of the Goal Model to artifacts and relations of the proto-architecture in an automatic way as was described in [56].…”

“…Therefore, we also suggest using PUMA when an UML-based design model is used, to put into practice the work presented in this paper. However, since ATRIUM has been used for this proof of concept, ATRIUM Scenario models and PRISMA Architectural models [56] have had to be used as input for the generation of the performance model. This led us to the development of the ATRIUM2LQN component by using the model-to-text transformation language, XPAND.…”